Monthly Archives: April 2013

I’m writing this on my way back from Glasgow (I would post it too but the ‘free wifi’ isn’t cooperating…by which I mean it isn’t working – at all).

But this is the big thing – I’ve just been returning the keys to our old apartment. Scary stuff! Kind of hard to believe that everything is done. Yes there are a couple of phone calls to make, and our deposit to get back – but the big things? Those are all done.

It was quite strange being back in way. The apartment is completely restored to its original state, although actually it is in a better state than when wee moved in – given that we actually cleaned it before we moved out. And to be blunt, it looks odd, so empty and dare I say soulless, though that may have more to do with the furnishings than anything else. Let’s just say we don’t miss the purple velour curtains, or the weird and slightly uncomfortable purple/gray/odd colour sofa. Or the assortment of random decorative items (dead leaf on a picture holder anyone?) Or the truly dreadful collection of assorted crockery and kitchen items, none of which matched each other. Or the kitchen curtains. I can well understand why we packed all the ‘furnishings’ up as soon as we moved in and hid them under the beds. So to see it restored to that original state (albeit cleaner) is going to be odd.

Curiously the new flat, despite being slightly smaller has far better use of space, with much better storage and thankfully fewer furnishings which needed to be hidden away. We’ve made it ours surprisingly quickly.

So I’m sitting on the train leaving Glasgow, but with the sense that I’m home. To Edinburgh. Still sounds odd when I say that.

I’ve been quiet for a couple of months, I know this, and to be fair there’s been a good reason for the lack of posting – namely the fact that we moved house. But first some background on this…

For the last 10 years (seriously 10? How did that happen) I’ve been living in Glasgow, I moved up there to do a Masters, then a PhD. After a couple of years I met J. We dated and moved in together. A couple of years on, he got a job, and started commuting to work. Good so far? Well, yes and no – job good, commute not so much – as the job was on the other side of the country in Edinburgh. So for the last few years he’s made the commute (about 3 hours minimum per day) from Monday to Friday, back and forth each day. We’d talked about shifting location on numerous occasions, but thanks to my part time work in Glasgow, it was financially sensible to stay in the West.

Until last year…

Things changed, as I made the decision to leave the part time work I was doing and take some time to work out what I wanted to do. I was working in academia and realised that while I like the research – history, archaeology, objects, reading and all the stories and theories that swirl around from these, I was not as happy with the path I’d found myself on which was working more in the education side of things. I had good students – both undergraduate and mature – but these were starting to get lost in the crowd, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the attitudes and lack of interest offered by what appeared to the majority. At the start of the last academic year I taught, J noted that I was angry and worked up about the students and the classes and I hadn’t actually started teaching at that point.

So I made the decision to walk away, the hours offered were becoming fewer and more unreliable, with less guarantee that courses would be running. With that kind of insecurity, it isn’t worth the stress. On top of that the amount of preparation and administration for what was effectively (at some points) a 2 hour a week job – the prep was around a day to a day and half – just simply isn’t feasible.

To add to this (and perhaps explain some of my reasoning) I realised in the March of 2012 that I was suffering with depression once again. Despite being in that situation before I failed to see the signs that I was wandering along that downhill slope again. It was only when a friend was discussing the fact that she feared she had depression that I realised that I was in that hole as well. Talking things over I suspect I had the depression, or at least the preliminary stages back at the start of the previous term when I was angry at the world. I honestly believe that the only reason I didn’t become aware of the problems during that semester was due to the hours I was working then – I don’t think I had time to notice!

I’ve spent a year so far working out what is going on in my head, working part time for friends, pottering about with yarn and guinea pigs. It’s helped but there is still further to go. My internal joke is that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up!

Anyway, to get back to the main point, without the ties to Glasgow being as strong, the time came to rethink the big ‘where we live’ question. So we did. That was on Feburary 25th. By March 6th we’d found a flat we liked, by the 15th we had the lease signed, got keys on the 25th and were all moved in by April 7th. You cannot say we were’t efficient. There are still a couple of loose ends to tie up in Glasgow but for the most part everything is done. The fact that it is Edinburgh out of the window now is taking some getting used to!

So why all the detail? Because of this post from Katie at Hilltop Cloud. Sometimes others can say what we want to say far more eloquently…